Desserts

Almond-Glazed Sugar Cookies
My friends and neighbors often refer to me as their “chef next door,” since I’m the go-to girl for all of their culinary questions. While I enjoy teaching them a new cooking method or sharing a no-fail recipe, I’ve learned a thing of two from them as well.

Almond King Cake
King Cake is a brioche-style cake that is drizzled with sugar glaze and decorated with the traditional Mardi Gras colors of purple (symbolizing justice), green (symbolizing faith) and gold (symbolizing power).

Almond Pound Cake
Old Fashioned pound cake is even better with a hint of almond extract.

Almond Toffee
A holiday tradition in our home, this tempting toffee makes a lovely gift when presented in a pretty glass container tied with a festive ribbon. Be sure to make some for yourself!

Amaretto Chocolate Sauce
The Amaretto Chocolate Sauce makes a great hostess gift during holiday party season, and can literally be whipped up in minutes

Apple and Dried Plum Tart with Cognac
Sweet dried plums are tucked among wedges of fresh apple in this simple dessert. A generous splash of Cognac complements the fruit. Brush melted apricot preserves over the warm tart for a quick and delicious glaze.

Blueberry-Almond Coffee Cake
Muffin mixes are great to have on hand for quick treats, but you can turn a standard blueberry muffin mix into a delicious coffee cake with the addition of a few ingredients.

Blueberry-Lemon Pound Cake
I love using cake mixes to come up with desserts that taste like they’re baked from scratch. I’ve come up with some tricks to make the best of convenient boxed cake mixes.

Blueberry Peach Deliciousness
Blueberries and peaches. What an awesome combination! When a recent CSA delivery included both, I used them to make a simple dessert that's not a cake, not a custard...it's just really good.

Cassata Ricotta
Tiramisu, the Italian dessert of coffee-soaked lady fingers or sponge cake layered with rich, sweetened mascarpone and dusted with cocoa powder, became an American sensation in the 1980s. But there’s another layered Italian dessert of merit that is overlooked on this continent.

Cherry Almond Teacakes
This classic petit four is all about a spectacular flavor combination: tangerine and almond. In each moist mouthful, sweet, tangy citrus cuts right through the round, rich flavor of nuts.

Cherry Vanilla Smoothie
The smoothie craze has hit the nation, becoming a favorite of milkshake-loving children and diet-conscious adults alike.

Chinese Almond Cookies
Children love baking cookies almost as much as they enjoy eating them. And, baking with your children gives you an opportunity to teach them culinary basics such as the proper way to measure flour, ream butter and sugar, and crack eggs.

Chocolate Chip and Dried Cherry Oatmeal Cookies
Oatmeal cookies, an all-American favorite, get an extra boost of flavor from chocolate chips and dried cherries. In addition to tasting great, the chocolate and cherries are good for you!

Chocolate Chip Pie
I love participating in "group" meals – from our bimonthly supper club to church covered dish socials, it is great fun to bring a dish and sample the preparations of others.

Chocolate Gelato
Gelato, the famous Italian ice cream, is considered by many to be the finest ice cream in the world. It has less air incorporated into it than American ice cream, which makes it very dense, allowing the flavor to really shine through, and it is typically lower in fat than American-style ice cream.

Chocolate-Oat Tarts
There’s something supremely comforting about oats. From oatmeal for breakfast to oatmeal cookies, cooking with oats adds special hominess to almost anything.

Chocolate Pate
My Chocolate Pâté calls for three types of chocolate, and I find the combination gives it a much more complex and interesting flavor than using just one.

Chocolate-Pecan Cookies
What could be better than the sublime flavor of chocolate surrounding bits of toasted pecans? The flavors are combined here in some crispy cookies that include lots of bittersweet chocolate.

Chocolate-Pecan Tarts
Almost no dessert is as easy to prepare as pecan pie, especially with the help of prepared pie crusts. Despite its ease, pecan pie is definitely a decadent treat, and the decadence can be taken over the top if you add good chocolate to the recipe.

Chocolate Peppermint Chews
Baking cookies is my favorite holiday chore, but after a couple of hours spent measuring, mixing and rolling, my interest wanes a bit. To make my work easier, I came up with a cookie that is a cinch to whip up, looks festive and tastes great.

Chocolate Soufflé
Some find soufflés to be intimidating, but they are really quite easy to prepare. A simple custard base is lightened with meringue, then baked until it reaches ethereal heights.

Cinnamon-Mocha Biscotti
The flavor of my Cinnamon-Mocha Biscotti reminds me of my favorite cappuccino with a splash of chocolate.

Cinnamon Pecan Pull-Aparts
During the holiday season, my Viking range gets a real workout. From pre-Christmas sweets, to a big family dinner, I put it through the test.

Citrus Drops
Lemon squares, brownies and cookies are all nice choices as pick-up desserts, but Citrus Drops top them all in presentation and ease of preparation.

Coconut Macaroon Squares
Gooey coconut macaroons are one of my favorite indulgences. My Coconut Macaroon Squares give you the taste of the individually prepared macaroons, without all the fuss.

Coconut-Mango Mousse
Fresh, ripe mangoes are the perfect finale at a Thai-inspired meal. But you can turn those perfect mangos into something a little more special by turning them into a mousse.

Coffee-Toffee Tortoni
A cool tortoni is the perfectly light ending to a hearty meal, and this classic Italian dessert is perfectly simple to prepare. The secret? Marshmallows!

Cranberry-Apple Crumble
Fresh apples and cranberries are topped with a toasty oatmeal, cinnamon and brown sugar topping that’s studded with pecans. The result is a warm and bubbling crumble that can be used as a side dish, dessert or relish for turkey or ham.

Cream Cheese Amaretto Brownies
Everyone loves brownies, so making a good thing even better can be tricky. Mission accomplished when you flavor a brownie mix with Amaretto and top it with cream cheese.

Cream Cheese Pumpkin Bars
During "pumpkin season," I whip up a batch of these delicious Cream Cheese Pumpkin Bars when pressed for time.

Dark Chocolate-Covered Homemade Marshmallows
You can easily make these delightful confections in your own kitchen. Delicious on their own or even more decadent dipped in chocolate and garnished with nuts, sprinkles or toasted coconut.

Date-Nut Torte
Desserts can be over-the-top, rich and decadent, but sometimes you just crave comfort. When that’s the case, nothing beats this Date-Nut Torte.

Dolce de Leche Freezes
Dolce de Leche Freezes are an easy, elegant dessert to follow your most special of meals.

Easy Caramel Apple Cupcakes
Caramel apples are an autumn favorite, and these quick and easy cupcakes take you straight back to your childhood with the flavors of your fall fair favorite.

Eggnog Panna Cotta
Enjoy your eggnog at the end of your holiday meal instead of the beginning with these simple-to-prepare Eggnog Panna Cottas. A quart of eggnog and some plain gelatin are all you need to make these delicious, light little individual desserts that are perfect for the holidays.

Espresso Blondies
These rich espresso flavored treats are incredibly moist! They are easiest to cut if you allow them to cool completely before cutting, but, for a decadent treat, serve them slightly warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Fresh Apple Cake
Autumn is apple season, and there’s nothing that will bring your family running to the kitchen like the smell of apples and cinnamon baking in the oven

Fresh Fruit Shortcake
Fresh fruit is the key to this fun and delectable dessert. You can even substitute fresh blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, or any combination of these fruits to suit your palate.

Frozen Mocha Mousse Pie
This pie combination also is the base for the Frozen Peanut Butter Pie and the Frozen Strawberry Margarita Pie recipes found on this site.

Frozen Peanut Butter Pie
With the help of your Viking stand mixer, this Southern classic is a snap to prepare. Garnishing this simple pie with chocolate sauce and melted peanut butter makes it extra special.

Frozen Strawberry Margarita Pie
Frozen pies are the perfect, cool way to end a summer meal, and they’re a boon for busy cooks since they must be made in advance. My Frozen Strawberry Margarita Pie is the perfect finale to a Southwestern menu, and can be whipped up in a snap in your Viking Food Processor.

Fudge Pound Cake
Fudge Pound Cake is always a hit, and this recipe begins with a Devil’s Food cake mix.

Gingerbread Scones with Maple Glaze
These are spiced with cinnamon, ginger and cloves and studded with crystallized ginger. A decorative drizzle of maple glaze adds just the right touch of sweetness.

Grand Marnier Pancakes
Performed tableside at countless restaurants around the world, Crêpes Suzette is one of the most famous desserts of all times. A delightful combination of cuisine and theater, it was created in 1895 by 14-year old Henri Charpentier at the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo.

Granny Smith Apple Sorbet
This refreshing and low-fat sorbet is loaded with taste without the calories. Perfect for a sweet snack whether or not you are watching your weight!

Haute Cocoa
Sharing cookies and hot cocoa while decorating the Christmas tree is a holiday tradition at my house. For the cookies, they’re home baked, and as for the cocoa, it features two kinds of gourmet chocolate and is appropriately called “Haute Cocoa.”

Homemade Praline Ice Cream
The ethereal combination of pecans and caramel, known as pralines, are a beloved Southern candy. In this recipe, those flavors are blended into rich and decadent homemade ice cream.

Individual Almond Cakes with Caramelized Pears
If you’re a fan of the flavor of almond you’re going to love these luscious little almond cakes topped with vanilla ice cream and drizzled with luscious caramelized pears. In fact, for lovers of the combination of almond and pears, this could be considered the “perfect” dessert.

Individual Raspberry-Almond Clafoutis
Clafouti is a classic French dessert that is quite simple to prepare. Traditional clafouti is a thick, pancake batter-like custard baked in a pie plate with fruit, usually cherries.

Jam Pizza
One of the students at my cooking classes, Lou Cameron, brought in a delicious Italian dessert for me to taste. A buttery sweet crust lined a pizza pan and was spread with preserves before being baked.

Jane's Oatmeal Cake
I usually serve Jane's Oatmeal Cake for an evening dessert, but it is sturdy enough to pack for a picnic or wrap as lunch-box treats.

Lemon-Cheese Tarts with Fresh Strawberries
There’s nothing quite as special to me as individual desserts. I love to come up with new ways to create my favorite desserts in individual servings rather than one piece.

Lemon-Pecan Tassies
Dessert is often a quandary at parties in which heavy hors d’oeuvres are served, since opting for a classic dessert requires plates and forks or spoons. These Lemon-Pecan Tassies fill the bill. They’re pretty and not too sweet.

Lemon Semolina Muffins
These delicious muffins are made even better with a hot lemon and sugar topping added at the very end.

Lemon Squares
Lemon squares are the ultimate sweet. They’re perfect with tea in the afternoon, make a lovely take-along dessert, and can be served as a pick-up sweet at a cocktail party.

Lemon Tart with Berry Sauce
While some think there’s nothing like a big dose of chocolate at the end of a meal, others prefer the tang of lemon to cleanse the palette.

Light Chocolate Cake
I think of this cake as a chocolate mousse miraculously held together by potato starch so the outside is crisp and the interior soft and tender. The Gâteau is served at room temperature and cuts like a sponge cake, though it tastes more like a luxurious dessert.

Meringue Mushrooms
These delectable little mushrooms are usually found "growing" around the base of a bûche de Noël or yule log - a traditional French Christmas cake that is shaped and decorated to look like a log.

Mexican Chocolate Cake
I’m married to a chocoholic. In fact, each January 18 I am responsible for coming up with a dessert that’s jaw-clenchingly chocolate for my husband’s birthday.

Midnight Cakelettes
There’s nothing like a rich, decadent dark chocolate dessert at the close of a meal. Usually, just a few bites are all you need to satisfy your cravings. Restaurants have answered the chocolate call with little chocolate cakes, often called "molten chocolate cake" or "chocolate lava cakes."

Olive Oil Pecan Pie
The key to making a short crust pastry with olive oil is to get the olive oil to the consistency of butter.

Orange Chiffon Cake with Citrus Curd
While the appearance of this three-layered cake is somewhat rustic, with gooey Citrus Curd dripping out between the layers, the flavors are anything but rustic.

Orange-Cranberry Biscotti
Biscotti are crisp, twice-baked, crescent-shaped Italian cookies that get a bad rap for being difficult to prepare.

Oranges with Spiced Wine Syrup
Fruit is nature’s perfect dessert. But when you want to make a simple preparation of orange segments or poached pears extra special, this zippy Spiced Wine Syrup is a wonderful, make ahead sauce.

Peach Cobbler Bars
Cobbler is a homey, comforting dessert that highlights in-season fruits, and I’ve come up with a way to make it portable in my Peach Cobbler Bars. The recipe is extremely simple, as it starts with two convenience products: packaged cake mix and canned pie filling.

Peaches Foster with Pecan Shortbread
Living in Georgia near the South Carolina state line means I have access to the best peaches in the country, in my opinion, from June through August no matter which direction I turn. I pick up the season’s best and then peel, slice and turn the gems into pies and preserves.

Peach-Mascarpone Crostatas
Fresh peaches abound during the months of July and August, and I love coming up with ways to use the fruits of the season. I add chunks of peaches to salads, sauce up grilled entrees with peach salsa and crank out peach pies en masse.

Prosecco Dessert Duo
Prosecco is a nice, crisp sparkling wine from Italy that is most commonly known as an ingredient in bellini cocktails.

Pumpkin Bread with Vanilla Cream Cheese Filling
This holiday favorite has a surprise - a stripe of creamy filling inside! This recipe will make 2 standard-sized loaves, which are ideal for entertaining, or 8 individual loaves, which are perfect for gift giving!

Pumpkin Flan
With its oozing caramel and sublime creaminess, flan is a special occasion dessert usually reserved for restaurant dining. However, it is surprisingly simple to prepare at home. This Pumpkin Flan will become a holiday favorite, and your family never has to know how easy it is to whip up.

Pumpkin-Pecan Pie Cake
Pie is king of the holiday dessert table, and pumpkin and pecan pies are traditional favorites. My Pumpkin-Pecan Pie Cake combines the two flavors in a tall three-layer cake that is quite simple to prepare.

Pumpkin Praline Cheesecake
I was first introduced to pumpkin cheesecake while dining in Atlanta in the 1980s. A lover of both pumpkin pie and cheesecake, I was definitely hooked.

Pumpkin Seed Praline Brittle
This lovely brittle resembles pieces of antique stained glass: green pumpkin seeds are encased in sheets of amber praline. Serve this brittle as candy, or use shards to garnish desserts such as cheesecakes, brownies or flan.

Quick Cone-Oli
I grew up in central Florida, where there was a family-owned Italian pizzeria on practically every corner. The pizza was always great, and for dessert there was always cannoli. Now that I reside in Augusta, Georgia, there’s not a cannoli to be found.

Quick Nutella Mousse
Rich, creamy and cool all describe the ethereal qualities of a well-made mousse. Most recipes for chocolate mousse call for melting chocolate and pulling out the stand or hand mixer.

Raspberry Granita
Traditionally, the liquid base for a granita is poured into a flat dish, placed in the freezer, and stirred by hand every few minutes. For convenience, ours is made in an ice cream machine, freeing you up to attend to other details in the kitchen.

Raspberry Tartlets
My mother’s favorite holiday cookie combination is anything with nuts and a touch of raspberry. Rolling out batches of sticky, buttery dough was not my favorite way to spend the busy holiday season, so I came up with these luscious little Raspberry Tartlets.

Spiced Honey Cake
This Spiced Honey Cake is the perfect fall or holiday dessert that sweetens the house wit the aroma of cardamom, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg. Perfect for entertaining, this cake tastes best when made ahead Spiced Honey Cake.

Strawberry Cupcakes
Rich, moist, and bursting with strawberry flavor, these dense little cupcakes are more like pound cake than your typical cupcake. The recipe may be doubled, and the cakes freeze beautifully.

Sweet Sticky Rice with Mango
During a Thai cooking class at a local gourmet store I lamented about making restaurant-style Thai rice pudding at home. One of my students showed up the next week with her recipe for Sweet Sticky Rice with Mango and it was exactly what I was looking for.

Three-Cheese Bread Pudding
I’m a huge fan of bread pudding. There’s just something about the not-too-sweet comfort dessert that appeals to me.

Touchdown Cookies
Ready-to-bake cookies step aside. There’s just nothing quite like real homemade cookies, especially when they’re packed with coconut, oats, two kinds of chips and two different nuts.

Tres Leche Cake
This is a quick and easy version that starts with a cake mix, and best if it refrigerates overnight. When you’re ready to serve you can ice the cake with sweetened whipped cream or just place a dollop of the cream on every slice.